Last week I spent three days in Spokane at the Pacific Northwest Economic Region meetings. Over 600 legislators, business people, and other interested folks from BC, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Alaska, Alberta, Saskatchewan, the Yukon and Northwest Territories gathered to talk about issues important to this region.

Echo chambers has been popular as a buzz phrase as of late, the idea that we post and share links and opinions that we agree with on social media to others that also agree with them, thereby amplifying their echo.

What happens to those chambers, though, when 'dark echoes' infect public debate?

People in Canada discard about 57 million plastic drinking straws every day. In my hometown of Vancouver, we toss out 2.6 million disposable cups every week. It’s a global problem. Plastic products are choking landfills and waterways and causing devastation in the oceans.

Last Halloween, Justin Trudeau launched a thousand photo ops by wearing a Superman costume into the House of Commons. Now it’s time for the Prime Minister to show Canadians what kind of Man of Steel he wants to be.

This month’s column is about travel, time, and identity. I have just returned from a four-week trip by car across the nation to Ontario and back. It is not the first such trip of my life; I have logged tens of thousands of miles since my first cross-continent drive in 1973, many of them by hitchhiking, some driving myself.